Year: 2007

Have you ever wanted to quickly run a C# application without having to setup a new project in Visual Studio and configure all the settings? A fellow developer here at Microsoft has written a tool called Code Runner .NET that allows just that. It isn’t scripting exactly because the code is still compiled before being…

I’m a member of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society and recently received requests to renew my subscriptions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that in 2008 student members of IEEE Computer Society can receive free software including Vista, Project, Visio and most interesting for me, Visual Studio Team System. Both subscriptions come with monthly journals…

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what’s new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008. We will be holding two sessions: Join the chat on Wednesday, December…

There are a lot of Microsoft bloggers, literally thousands of them. When I first joined Microsoft I wasn’t sure who to read. I’ve gradually built up a list based on interesting product and feature announcements and people I’ve met. Here they are: Profiling Our Team Blog IanWho’s Blog. Written by a fellow dev on the…

I’ve been here at Microsoft for more than 6 months so I guess you could say that I’ve passed through the Honeymoon Phase. By now the initial joy and excitement should be starting to wear off and I should be settling into a monotonous routine. Well I’m happy to say that it hasn’t happened so…

I’ve been thinking about what some of the most important tools are for me while coding. Here’s a few: Good IDE – syntax highlighting, integrated builds, source control integration, search facility, debugger and profiler built-in. I use VSTS. Source control/bug tracking system. I use TFS (typically a dogfood version of TFS). Windows Task Manager. I…

In C++, memory allocated with the ‘new’ keyword must be deallocated using ‘delete’ or it is not deallocated until the application finishes. A call to delete results in a call to the destructor for that class. Classes that are allocated on the stack are automatically destroyed, which calls their destructor, when they go out of scope….

Today we released Beta 2 of VS2008. This is the first public release from Microsoft that contains a nontrivial amount of code that I wrote (even though I haven’t written too much code just yet). I had barely synched up the source tree and only fixed a couple of bugs when we released Beta 1…

I was trying to write some type-generic (almost) code in C# using a pattern that I commonly use in C++. A very simple version of what I was trying to do looks something like: class B{}; template<typename T> int convert(T value) { return (int)value; } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { convert(3.5f); convert(11.5);…

I hadn’t heard the term dogfooding used much before I started here, but it has already been explained so take a look here. The basic idea is that if you’re not happy using your product (i.e. eating your own dogfood) then why should you expect your customers to be? Working at Microsoft gives you incredible scope…